Imagine a trio of tech-savvy and entrepreneurial souls on the prowl for the next killer app. They’re staying up late in their dorm, or perhaps they’re celebrating at a nightclub after finishing their MBA program. They want to make money. They want to change the world. They want to create something that gets snatched up by the titans of e-industry for billions of dollars. They want to retire in their twenties.

They want to disrupt.

Disrupters identify an industry that can be transformed by new technologies to make it more efficient or consumer-friendly. Amazon has transformed retail. Uber has wreaked havoc on taxi companies. Airbnb has challenged the hotel industry.

These transformations often get grouped together under the category of “innovation,” as in “making new.” Whether the new is better or not is, of course, a matter of opinion.

In some sense, these innovations are nothing new, just more of the same “creative destruction” of capitalism that Joseph Schumpeter defined in 1942. But these disrupters often seem more bent on tearing something down than creating something new. In the old days, innovators might end up upending existing practices — the car dispensing with the horse, the Internet killing the airmail letter — but they were focused more on their technological advance. Today’s disrupters seem to start with the teardown, not with the blueprint of their vision.

So, has this spirit of disruption spread into politics?

Last year, former Obama administration adviser Pippa Malmgren made a splash by calling Donald Trump “the Uber of politics.” It was one of those insights that seems intuitively right. Here’s a guy who has built a reputation as a disrupter — in the construction industry, in reality television, in sexual politics, and now in the world of politics. He goes after the status quo with a hatchet.

But the analogy doesn’t quite work, not for Trump at least. He has a disruptive personality. But for the most part he doesn’t have a portfolio of Plan Bs to substitute for the status quo. There’s nothing creative about Trump’s destruction.

Still, the disruption model does pertain to other populist politics. After all, the current political system is ripe, perhaps even overripe, for disruption. So, buckle your seatbelt and brace yourself for a bumpy political ride.

Uber, for instance, has offered a different way for people to get from A to B. It hasn’t, however, destroyed the taxi system. It hasn’t eliminated public transportation. It’s become just another choice on the menu. Driverless cars, by contrast, would be a fundamental change in system. A transporter that moved people from one place to another via some Star Trek-like technology would be revolutionary. Uber is more like those “dollar vans” that ferry people around New York City to places underserved by the subway and bus lines.

Trump is no revolutionary either. He’s more than fine with capitalism, with Wall Street, with the glaring economic inequalities of U.S. society. He’s also fine with politics as usual, though he’d like to hijack the Republican Party and remake it in his own image. He’s not interested in draining the swamp, only in swapping out old cronies with his cronies.

Even his foreign policy isn’t transformative, despite his aversion to everything that Barack Obama accomplished. He’s against particular trade deals, but not free trade in general. He doesn’t like liberal internationalism, but has no problem with his own brand of illiberal internationalism — that is, a multilateralism of oligarchs.

But here’s where they differ. Uber is all about Plan B. In fact, Uber is Plan B.

Donald Trump has no Plan B. He tears up the Iran nuclear agreement and has no alternative. Oh, Mike Pompeo laid out a 12-point plan this week at the Heritage Foundation. But in the absence of European, Russian, and most importantly Iranian support, Pompeo was offering only a thin cover for his regime-change preferences.

There’s been no Plan B for the Paris climate accord, for a new deal with Cuba, for nuclear arms control reductions.

With a number of other Trump policies in the global arena, there’s no Plan B because Plan A turns out to be what Trump wanted all along: more military spending, continued war in Afghanistan, widespread drone attacks and Special Forces deployments. In other words, there’s been no disruption at all in the status quo for the national security state. Libertarians and anti-interventionists who pulled the lever for Trump were duped. Trump is perfectly happy to maintain the essential game plan of U.S. hegemony: armed exceptionalism.

Yes, Trump is playing the disrupter in certain respects. For instance, the president has a Plan B for immigration. His Wall, his Muslim travel ban, his separation of children from their parents: this is an alternative of sorts to what was, with a partial wall along the border with Mexico and a spike in deportations under Obama, a status quo hostile to the undocumented. Trump is pushing a more disruptive policy in order to achieve his ultimate goal of a whiter America.

When it comes to government in general — outside the national security realm — Trump also an alternative in mind. He’s installed heads of agencies who oppose the very missions they’re supposed to carry out, whether Scott Pruitt at the EPA or Betsy DeVos at Education. His Plan B: an idiocracy.

But perhaps the most important transformation Trump has carried out is epistemological. He has altered the American perception of reality by lying so grandiosely, so repeatedly, and so unashamedly that his supporters now operate in a parallel universe according to different rules, laws, and facts. His Plan B: a looking-glass world.

In general, then, Trump is a disrupter at the level of style, not substance. Scratch him and he turns out to be just a conventional white guy with a potty mouth, a distorted sense of reality, and delusions of grandeur. To call him the “Uber of politics” is, frankly, too much of a compliment.

The True Disrupters

The current political paradigm is certainly ripe for disruption.

Democracy, like so many bricks-and-mortar enterprises, no longer delivers the goods. The two party system — call them Democrats and Republicans or Social Democrats and Christian Democrats — doesn’t effectively address the urgent issues of the day, from economic inequality to climate change. For some decades now, interest-group politics has become sclerotic, as people have grown disgusted with a mere rotation of elites and influence peddlers.

According to an October 2017 Washington Post-University of Maryland poll, 71 percent of Americans believe that American politics has reached a dangerously low point. Worldwide, support for non-democratic alternatives has risen, particularly among young people, according to research conducted by political scientist Yascha Mounk.

So, let’s now substitute that trio of entrepreneurs gunning for a killer app with their political counterparts. These true disrupters see an enormous opportunity — not just to destroy the status quo, but also to implement their version of Plan B.

Consider the Five Star Movement (FSM) in Italy, the brainchild of comedian Beppe Grillo. Its most galvanizing action came with V-Day, in 2007. “V” stands for vaffanculo, Italian for “up yours.” Two million people showed up to give the finger to establishment politics. That’s a very Trumpian gesture (and, after November 2016, a very anti-Trumpian gesture as well).

Today, the “post-ideological” FSM has teamed up with the very ideological Lega, a far-right wing party that derives much of its support from its anti-immigrant platform. The 2018 elections were, effectively, a big V-Day. The situation is so dire, Italian voters said with their ballots, that we’ll vote for the party that started as a joke to save us from an economy that has become a joke. FSM got 33 percent of the vote, Lega 18 percent.

In some ways, FSM and Lega remain very Trumpian in their appeal to disgruntled white people, particularly men. They have also gone down the same epistemological wormhole as Trump. As Vito Laterza explains in al Jazeera:

Both parties are supported by ecosystems of fake news, pushing anything from anti-Semitic and racist propaganda about George Soros to claims about the Obama administration plotting to smuggle migrants from Libya to Italy, or anti-vaccine conspiracies. The Five Star Movement has been particularly good at presenting sanitized messages in mainstream media while allowing their social media followers to spread hate, racism, and fake news.

But they’re not just about undermining the status quo. Lega’s Plan B sounds like Trump’s. In contrast, FSM has cobbled together its alternative from across the political spectrum. Alexander Stille writes in The New York Review of Books:

They have been harshly critical of the EU; they have criticized the left for what they consider its lax policies toward illegal immigration, but stop well short of the right’s full-throated call to deport 600,000 illegal immigrants. They are against the privatization of various public services, such as water, and oppose waste incineration, nuclear energy, and high-speed trains. But then, they support protections for local industry and a guaranteed minimum income, which may have been a winning argument for many voters in this latest election.

The two parties recently proposed Giuseppe Conte as prime minister, a lawyer and political neophyte. Perhaps an unusual choice for such anti-establishment parties, Conte nevertheless embraces the post-ideological label. “I think 20th-century ideological schemes are no longer adequate,” he says. “It’s more important to evaluate a political force based on how they are positioned on fundamental rights and freedom.”

Arguably Italy needs some serious disruption. Its economy has been stagnant, and the unemployment rate for young people is one of the highest in Europe. The country faces two migration crises. Refugees and economic migrants continue to stream in from the south across the Mediterranean (though the rate slowed last year). And young people in particular are flowing out of the country, nearly 50,000 in 2016 alone.

Who can blame Italians for wanting the kind of change that the established parties of the center left and right haven’t been able to provide? Italians want a new way to get from A to B.

Italy is not alone. Disruptive movements led the Brexit initiative in the UK, have come to power in Austria, and now lead many of the countries of Eastern Europe. These movements also have their Plan Bs. Euroskeptics want to exit or at least weaken the EU. Illiberal democrats want to consolidate power in their own hands and squeeze pluralism out of their political systems. Islamophobes and racists want to forge more homogenous, Christian societies.

So far, however, these parties and movements are all operating within the system. They are disrupters, not revolutionaries. Like Uber, they primarily know what they don’t like. Like Uber, they are fueled by discontent with the current dispensation. Like Uber, they provide what they consider a technical fix.

The true dystopia dawns when these disrupters begin to achieve systemic change, when all their Plan Bs add up to a fundamental transformation of the status quo: the collapse of the EU, mass expulsion of immigrants, the declaration of an extended “state of emergency” that justifies the suspension of the rule of law.

The status quo is unjust. The planet is becoming ever more divided and overheated. Unless progressives come up with a more convincing Plan B, the disrupters of the far right will establish something even more unjust and unsustainable. One such progressive Plan B, the Poor People’s Campaign, plans disruptions all summer long.

Let’s hope that this campaign adds up to considerably more than just another Uber of politics.

The question is: Has the Trump administration already made a decision to go to war with Iran, similar to the determination of the Bush administration to invade Iraq in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks?

Predictions are dicey things, and few human institutions are more uncertain than war. But several developments have come together to suggest that the rationale for using sanctions to force a re-negotiation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is cover for an eventual military assault by the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia aimed at regime change in Tehran.

Sanctions Seem Designed to Fail

As clueless as the Trump administration is on foreign policy, the people around the White House — in particular National Security Advisor John Bolton — know that sanctions rarely produce results, and unilateral ones almost always fail.

Sanctions aimed at Cuba, North Korea, Iraq, and Libya did not dislodge any of those regimes and, in the case of North Korea, spurred Pyongyang into producing nuclear weapons. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi were eventually overthrown, but by American firepower, not sanctions (and with disastrous results).

The only case in which sanctions produced some results were those applied to Iran from 2010 to 2015. But that embargo was multi-lateral and included China, India, and one of Iran’s major customers, the European Union. When the U.S. unilaterally applied sanctions to Cuba, Iran, and Libya in 1996, the move was a conspicuous failure.

This time around, the White House has made no effort to involve other countries. The Trump plan is to use the power of the American economy to strong-arm nations into line. Back our sanctions, threatens the administration, or lose access to the U.S. market. And given that the world uses the dollar as its de-facto international currency, financial institutions may find themselves barred from using the Society for Worldwide Interbank Telecommunications (SWIFT), the American-controlled network that allows banks and finance centers to transfer money from country to county.

Those threats have not exactly panicked the rest of the world. China and India, which between them buy more than 1 million of the 2.1 million barrels of oil Iran produces each day, say they will ignore the sanctions. And according to Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign affairs minister, “The European Union is determined to act in accordance with its security interests and protect its economic investments.”

Adding up all the countries that will go along with the sanctions — including South Korea and Japan — will cut Tehran’s oil exports by 10 to 15 percent. That hurts, but it’s nothing like the 50 percent plus that Iran lost under the prior sanctions regime.

The War Party

In short, the sanctions won’t work, but were they really meant to?

It’s possible that the White House somehow thinks they will — delusion is a characteristic of the Oval Office these days — but other developments suggest the administration is already putting in place a plan that will lead from economic sanctions to bombing runs.

For starters, there’s the close coordination between the White House and Tel Aviv. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s April 30 speech shortly before Trump withdrew from the Iran agreement was tailored to give Washington a casus belli to dump the agreement. Virtually all of what Netanyahu “revealed” about the Iranian nuclear program was old news, already known by U.S., Israeli, and European intelligence services.

Four days before Netanyahu’s speech Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman met with his American counterparts and, according to Al Monitor, got a “green light” for any military action Tel Aviv might take against Iran.

The same day Lieberman was meeting with the Pentagon, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Saudi Arabia to end its campaign against Qatar because the Americans wanted the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to be united around a campaign against Iran.

Each of these moves seems calculated to set the stage for a direct confrontation with Iran involving some combination of the U.S., Israel, and the two most aggressive members of the GCC, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The latter two are currently waging a brutal war on the Iranian-supported Houthis in Yemen, racking up thousands of civilian casualties.

The Likely Fallout

It’s almost impossible to imagine what the consequences of such a war might be.

On paper, it looks like a cakewalk for the anti-Tehran axis. Iran has an antiquated air force, a bunch of fast speedboats, and tanks that date back to the 1960s. The military budgets of the U.S., Israel, and the GCC are more than 58 times those of Iran. But, as the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz once remarked, the only thing one can determine in war is who fires the first shot.

Military might does not translate into an automatic win. After almost 17 years of war, the U.S. is still bogged down in Afghanistan, and it basically left Iraq with its tail between its legs. Indeed, the last time the American military indisputably won a war was in Grenada.

As for the GCC, in spite of more than two years of relentless warfare in Yemen, the monarchs are no nearer victory than they were when the war started. And in Lebanon, the Iranian-allied Hezbollah fought Israel to a stalemate in 2006.

While Iran doesn’t have much in the way of military force, it has 80 million people with a strong streak of nationalism who would certainly unite against any attacker. It would be impossible to “win” a war against Iran without resorting to a ground invasion.

But none of Iran’s antagonists have the capacity to carry that out. The Saudis have a dismal military record, and the UAE’s troops are stalemated in their campaign to take Yemen’s capital, Saana, from the rag-tag Houthi militia. The Israelis don’t have the troops — and, in any case, would never put them in harm’s way so far from home — and the Americans are not about to send in the Marines.

Most likely this would be a war of aircraft and missiles to destroy Iran’s military and civilian infrastructure. There’s little that Tehran could do to stop such an assault. Any planes it put up would be toast, its anti-aircraft weapons are obsolete, and its navy wouldn’t last long.

But flattening Tehran’s military isn’t winning a war, and Iran has other ways to strike back. The Iranians, for instance, have shown considerable skill at asymmetric warfare in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, and Iran does have missiles of its own.

The real damage, however, will be the fallout from the war. The price of oil is already on the rise, and hostilities in the middle of one of the world’s largest petroleum repositories will likely send it through the roof. While that will be good for the GCC, high oil prices will put a dent into the economies of the EU, China, India, and even the United States.

What a war will almost certainly do is re-ignite Iran’s push to build a nuclear weapon. If that happens, Saudi Arabia will follow, and the world will be faced with several new nuclear powers in one of the most volatile regions of the world.

Halting the Inevitable

Which doesn’t mean war is inevitable.

The Trump administration hawks broke the JCPOA because they hoped Iran would then withdraw as well, giving the anti-Iranian axis an excuse to launch a war. Iranians are divided on this issue, with some demanding that Tehran accelerate its uranium enrichment program, while others defend the agreement.

Europe can play a key role here by firmly supporting the JCPOA and resisting the American sanctions, even if it means taking a financial hit. Some European firms, however, have already announced they will withdraw their investments.

The U.S. Congress can also help stop a war, although it will require members — mostly Democrats — to put aside their anti-Iranian bias and make common cause with the “stay in the pact” Europeans. This is a popular issue. A CNN poll found that 63 percent of Americans opposed withdrawing from the agreement.

It will also mean that the Congress — again, mainly Democrats — will have to challenge the role that Israel is playing. That will not be easy, but maybe not as difficult as it has been in the past. Israel’s brutality against Palestinians over the past month has won no friends except in the White House and the evangelical circuit, and Netanyahu has made it clear that he prefers Republicans to Democrats.

Lastly, Congress should cut the arms pipeline to the GCC and stop aiding the Saudis in their war on Yemen

If war comes, Americans will find themselves in the middle of an unwinnable conflict that will destabilize the Middle East and the world’s economy, and pour more of this country’s resources into yet another quagmire.

“As a sniper I was not usually the victim of a traumatic event, but the perpetrator of violence and death,” recalled Garrett Rapenhagen of Iraq Veterans Against the War in an essay for Salon.

“My actions in combat would have been more acceptable to me if I could cloak myself in the belief that the whole mission was for a greater good,” he reflected. “Instead, I watched as the purpose of the mission slowly unraveled.”

These words illustrate the concept of moral injury — where a soldier’s conscience has been shaken by what he or she has done, resulting in lasting trauma.

For so many of us, war is something that happens somewhere else. It’s a television news update or a click on the screen, at worst. The real costs of U.S. wars happen to other people, in other places.

Will ordinary Americans ever have to reckon with moral injury?

In Yemen, the non-profit organization Save the Children estimated that 50,000 children died in 2017 due to extreme hunger and disease. Yemen is currently under attack from Saudi Arabia with support from the United States.

In Afghanistan, invaded and occupied by the United States for the last generation, at least 31,000 civilians have been killed. In Iraq, a very conservative estimate from the monitoring group Iraq Body Count found that over 200,000 civilians had died as a result of the aggressive war initiated by the Bush administration.

Beyond the deaths, war is tearing apart entire societies.

The World Bank estimated that the economic cost of the war in Syria from 2011 to 2016 was four times the size of Syria’s economy. The United Nations reports that about one quarter of the entire country’s population has fled the war and become refugees, including more than 2 million children under 12.

In the United States, the equivalent would be 80 million people fleeing not just their homes, but the country as a whole.

From the founding of our country all the way through the 21st century, the United States has been embroiled in nearly continuous warfare — whether against Native Americans, or later against Latin Americans, or later still against developing world countries leaning toward socialism. And where it has not gone to war, it’s used proxies like Saudi Arabia and Israel to fight on its behalf.

As a result, when a president tweets bellicose rhetoric against Iran, North Korea, or Venezuela, he’s not really out of step with the bulk of American history. For the past 100 years, both Democratic and Republican presidents and Congresses have initiated or funded wars throughout the world, whether in Vietnam, or Haiti, or Iraq.

Our society has become inured to the wars we pay for. Do you know how many countries the United States is at war with? Can you name them all?

So, on this Memorial Day, take a moment to pause from your barbecue and look at your flag. If you want it to stand for something more than violence, you’ll need to do more than thank the veterans who have died for our sins. You’ll need to join vets like Rappenhagen in starting to make amends.

On May 14, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin smiled for pictures in front of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Big day for Israel,“ Donald Trump tweeted. “Congratulations!“

Meanwhile, just miles away in Gaza, Yazan Ibraheem Mohammed Al-Tubassi lay dying after repeatedly being shot by Israeli troops during protests at the Gaza border fence. Elsewhere, relatives of Taher Ahmed Madi — another shooting victim — carried his body home from the hospital to prepare for his funeral.

No words can describe the anger and anguish I feel as a Palestinian in America watching this unfold.

The protests weren’t about the relocation of the U.S. embassy. They began several weeks ago to mark the anniversary of the Nakba, or “catastrophe” — the mass exodus and ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians since Israel’s founding in 1948.

Every year, while Israelis celebrate the establishment of their state, millions of Palestinians mourn the end to their existence as they knew it.

For the Trump administration to choose this day for the relocation of the embassy while Palestinians were being murdered just 60 miles away is horrendously cruel. The United States has proven that it isn’t only indifferent toward Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, but has actively green lit the violence of the past few weeks.

In 1948, my grandparents, whose families had lived in Palestine for hundreds of years, were forced out of the only home they ever knew. Practically overnight, they were made into refugees and forced to make the almost 200-mile journey to Jordan on foot.

Leaving behind their belongings, family, and memories, they settled in Jordan, hoping the international community would help them one day return to their homes.

My grandparents, who never stopped talking about their life in Palestine, never saw it again. They passed away in Jordan, leaving the key to their house in Palestine with my family. We still have it today, serving as a reminder of our roots — and of the abuse my family and so many others have suffered under Israel.

Still, I’m reminded that my grandparents were fortunate enough to make it out alive. The millions who have been forced into Gaza cannot say the same. They aren’t free to come and go as they choose, but remain locked in the world’s largest open air prison — cut down if they so much as approach the “border fence“ with Israel.

Only 10 percent of Gazans have access to safe drinking water, almost half of the population is unemployed, and over 70 percent live in poverty. They get only a few hours of electricity a day. Not to mention the psychological effects of living under siege, and the daily fear of attacks by Israel.

It’s infuriating to see my own country actively condoning brutal violence against my people while other countries sit back and watch. How can Palestinians ever trust a “peace process“ led by an administration that degrades them this way?

I keep hearing people say that Gazans need to “protest peacefully“ as Israeli snipers gun them down methodically. They’re being given two options: Either suffer inhumane treatment or get killed protesting it. It’s not much of a choice.

Razan Azzarkani is a Palestinian American living in Virginia and working at the Center for Global Policy.

https://fpif.org/americas-treatment-of-palestinians-has-grown-horrendously-cruel/feed/033496Questioning War is a Civic Duty. Why Do So Few Do It?https://fpif.org/questioning-war-is-a-civic-duty-why-do-so-few-do-it/
https://fpif.org/questioning-war-is-a-civic-duty-why-do-so-few-do-it/#respondWed, 23 May 2018 14:35:14 +0000Kevin Baslhttps://fpif.org/?p=33492

(Photo: Joseph Holmes / Flickr)

“How do you motivate men and women to fight and die for a cause many of them don’t believe in, and whose purpose they can’t articulate?”

That’s what Phil Klay, author and U.S. Marine Corps veteran, asks in an essay published this month in The Atlantic. Unfortunately, he points out in a recent New York Times op-ed, “Serious discussion of foreign policy and the military’s role within it is often prohibited” by what he calls “patriotic correctness.”

In a well-functioning democracy, Klay argues, citizens must debate and question how their elected officials employ their military, an organization which ought to represent the values of the people. But it seems many Americans remain unconcerned about the wars the United States is currently fighting (at last count, we’re bombing at least 7 countries) though they foot the bill both in tax dollars and lives.

Why has criticism of our nation’s ongoing military follies become so muted?

I suspect, as Klay does, that some well-meaning people worry that questioning our nation’s wars means not “supporting our troops.” The question Klay doesn’t get into is why anyone should think that.

The answer is that some politicians — and businesses — want them to.

In the late 1960s, thousands of Vietnam War veterans started joining anti-war protests, bringing new energy and authority to the movement. They’d witnessed the war’s horrors firsthand and wanted to end it immediately, which put the Nixon administration in a bind.

In The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (1998), sociologist and Vietnam War veteran Jerry Lembcke argues that the Nixon administration used propaganda and misinformation to divide veterans and antiwar protesters, weakening their burgeoning movement.

The mythical image of anti-war protestors “spitting on veterans,” reinforced in many films, suggested that peace activists were traitors to the national cause and — perhaps worse — abusive to veterans.

Whether the spitting actually happened (Lembcke could find no evidence proving it did) isn’t the point. It’s the significance of the rhetoric those divisive times left us with: We can never let happen again what happened to Vietnam War veterans.

During the 1991 Gulf War, that rhetoric was used by the Bush Sr. administration to steer public discourse. Debate about going to war with Iraq got drowned under constant reminders to “support our troops.”

In the new millennium, the same rhetoric helped push Bush Jr.’s War on Terror. According to a Center for American Progress study, in 2008 the White House website contained 357 separate documents including the phrase “support our troops.”

Obama also used the rhetoric. “Because of Vietnam and our veterans,” Obama said at an event marking the war’s 50th anniversary, “we honor our military more, we take care of our veterans better.” (Never mind that the VA disability backlog of veterans awaiting care had topped 800,000.)

And Trump, who continues to keep the VA understaffed and underfunded, has requested a grandiose military parade, under the pretense of being a military appreciation celebration.

It’s no wonder why some would work to smother public debate about war. War is good business for the rich.

Defense contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman make huge political campaign contributions and expect lucrative contracts in return. Major brands like Budweiser and Walmart regularly use “support our troops” marketing campaigns, too.

Interestingly, as we approach year 17 in Afghanistan — a war even Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has admitted we’re losing — “support our troops” spectacles have only grown (see any recent major league sports game).

Those spectacles miss the point. We must remain ever-skeptical of war, Phil Klay reminds us, if we are to preserve our democracy or support our troops.

For one thing, the announcement came as a complete surprise. Trump had telegraphed his other foreign policy bombshells well in advance: leaving the Paris climate accord, ripping up the Iran nuclear deal, reversing détente with Cuba. North Korea was another matter. Trump had repeatedly insulted Kim Jong-un in his trademark style, calling him “Little Rocket Man” on Twitter and threatening at the U.N. in September 2017 to “totally destroy North Korea.” Official Washington was braced for war, not peace.

You’d think, then, that an announcement of jaw-jaw, not war-war, would have met with universal acclaim in the nation’s capital. Instead, observers across the ideological spectrum found fault with Trump and his attempt to denuclearize North Korea through negotiations. They criticized his timing, his impulsiveness, even the fact that the announcement came from South Korean representatives visiting Washington and not the president himself.

Experts on Korea promptly decried the president’s move because he hadn’t demanded any North Korean concessions first. “We’d expect such a highly symbolic meeting to happen after some concrete deliverables were in hand, not before,” tweeted New America Foundation fellow Suzanne DiMaggio. (In fact, the North Koreans had declared a moratorium on further testing of their nukes and missiles, but that apparently didn’t count.)

Worse yet, the North Koreans were getting the summit of their dreams for nothing. “Kim will accomplish the dream of his father and grandfather by making North Korea a nuclear state,” tweeted Abraham Denmark, head of Asia programs at the Wilson Center, “and gain tremendous prestige and legitimacy by meeting with an American president as an equal. All without giving up a single warhead or missile.”

Although some foreign policy professionals did express cautious optimism that something good could still come from the first summit between an American president and a North Korean leader — now officially scheduled for June 12th in Singapore — the overall verdict was one of barely concealed dismay. “The U.S. has been getting played and outmaneuvered the past three months… and it’s happening again, right now,” tweeted former Pentagon official Van Jackson.

Skepticism is, of course, the default position of the foreign policy community. Bad things happen all the time in geopolitics; peace is an extraordinarily difficult feat to pull off; and most diplomatic outcomes are, at best, glass-half-full affairs. So, for pundits eager to maintain their gigs on network TV and a steady stream of interview requests from print journalists, it was a far better bet to put their chips on double zero.

And it’s true, the history of U.S.-North Korean relations has been a graveyard of defunct initiatives: the Agreed Framework of 1994, the Six Party Talks from 2003 to 2007, the Leap Day Agreement of 2012. If North Korea were to cancel the summit because of U.S.-South Korean military exercises or the inflammatory statements of John Bolton, it would become just another headstone. Far more competent negotiators than Donald Trump tried their hands at preventing the North from going nuclear and suffered epic fails. More troubling still, Trump was preparing for negotiations without even an ambassador in South Korea, lacking a special representative for North Korean policy, and with a new secretary of state barely confirmed by the Senate. In other words, at that key moment, “understaffed” would have been an understatement when it came to the U.S. diplomatic corps and the Koreas.

Finally, both Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump have posted some of the highest negatives since Attila the Hun. The notion that two such wrongs could make a right certainly tests the credulity of the most dispassionate observer. You wouldn’t normally want to buy a used car, much less a complex diplomatic deal, from either of them.

And yet, don’t fool yourself (even if most of Washington does): the upcoming Trump-Kim summit, if it happens, will represent an extraordinarily important step forward, whether it actually produces an agreement of substance or not. It may not end the longest ongoing conflict in U.S. history, but that’s really not the point. The summit’s importance lies largely in its symbolic encouragement of another process entirely, one already underway between the two Koreas. U.S. observers remain focused on nuclear weapons, but nukes aren’t actually the key issue here. In fact, for all the talk about Donald Trump getting a Nobel Prize, to put events in perspective you need to remember that the American president is, at best, a third wheel in what’s developing.

The leaders of the two Koreas have effectively manipulated him into supporting a genuinely hopeful, potentially history-changing process of reconciliation on their peninsula. It’s been a brilliant tactic and if U.S. observers of Korea could put aside their kneejerk skepticism, as well as their America First biases, they would be applauding the best chance in decades for Koreans themselves to defuse the most dangerous situation in Asia.

Playing the President

In keeping with his particular brand of narcissism, Donald Trump is convinced that he alone is responsible for bringing about change on the Korean peninsula. He believes that his threats against the North, his push for tougher sanctions, and his pressure on China to tighten the screws on its erstwhile ally were the key factors in Kim Jong-un’s decision at the beginning of 2018 to reach out to his southern neighbor and extend an olive branch to Washington.

In truth, the initial impetus for the changes in Korea had little to do with President Trump.

After his country conducted its sixth nuclear test in September 2017 and its first ICBM test that November, the North Korean leader must have come to believe that his nuclear weapons program was the sufficiently solid deterrent and valuable bargaining chip he had been seeking. By then, too, he had consolidated his political control in Pyongyang by purging the party, the military, and even his own family, leaving him confident that he could negotiate agreements outside the country without worrying about a palace coup back home. Finally, the North Korean economy was actually managing modest growth, despite the fierce American sanctions campaign against it. This was in part because so many countries were willing to look the other way in the face of widespread violations of the global sanctions regime.

Undoubtedly, Kim was aware of warning signs as well: a dangerous economic dependence on China, a lack of capital for investment, and a declining growth rate. When it came to all three, the logical place to turn was South Korea. Since taking office in March 2017, South Korean President Moon Jae-in had pushed hard for a new engagement policy with the North.

For many months, Pyongyang did not respond, so Moon mended fences where he could. He launched a “New Northern Policy,” focusing on fostering further cooperation with Russia. That November, he reached a compromise with China, promising not to expand a new U.S. missile defense system placed in South Korea earlier in the year in exchange for Beijing lifting restrictions on trade and investment.

In a New Year’s speech in January 2018, however, Kim Jong-un suddenly and very publicly reversed his position. Moon was already well primed — some might say desperate — to take advantage of such a gesture. As a result, in the full glare of international media attention, the two Koreas suddenly launched a policy of cooperation at the 2018 Winter Olympics being held at the time in the south. Then, at the end of April, Kim and Moon actually met in the first inter-Korean summit to take place on South Korean soil.

This was, admittedly, not the first time the two Koreas had attempted a détente, but previous efforts had been stymied, at least in part, by American opposition. Congressional hostility toward North Korea during the latter years of the Clinton era and George W. Bush’s inclusion of North Korea in his ominous “axis of evil” in 2002 put a distinct damper on the possibility of inter-Korean cooperation.

This time, however, the two leaders adopted a new strategy for roping the United States into the process. Instead of appealing to the Korea policy community in Washington — an unimaginative gaggle of Cassandras — each of them decided to “turn” the U.S. president.

Initially, both were undoubtedly as bemused by Donald Trump’s erratic foreign policy tweets as the rest of the world. Still, Kim and his officials reached out to Republican-linked analysts in Washington and soon grasped that the new president valued personal relationships, discounted the advice of policy professionals, dismissed the importance of human rights, and measured his successes largely by the failures of his predecessors, especially Barack Obama.

Keep in mind as well that, for all the hostility Trump had directed toward Pyongyang during the 2016 presidential campaign, he had also signaled — though at the time it was treated as a throwaway line — that he’d be pleased to meet Kim Jong-un and serve him “a hamburger on a conference table.” As president, in May 2017, months before he started threatening to deliver “fire and fury like the world has never seen” to the North, he even called Kim a “smart cookie” and reiterated his willingness to sit down with him. In both instances, he received mockery, not support, from America’s Korea watchers who considered him “naïve” (which was true but beside the point).

Most critically, the North Koreans evidently realized that they could appeal to Trump’s desire to destroy the legacy of Barack Obama. The president had fervently promised to unravel anything and everything his predecessor had ever done, from health care to climate change. But on the Korean peninsula, Obama had never achieved a thing. His policy of “strategic patience” had amounted to little more than eight years of hoping that North Korea would relocate to another planet. In such a situation, the North’s appalling human rights record, its spotty negotiating history, and its very real nuclear weapons program mattered little in Trump’s quest to once again one-up Obama.

South Korea faced a similar set of challenges. In the fall of 2017, Trump accused Moon Jae-in of the “appeasement” of North Korea, though he provided no specifics. Normally, such a charge would have been poison in Washington. Moon could certainly have upped the ante by retaliating in kind. Instead, he cannily held his tongue — and when the tone suddenly shifted in inter-Korean relations in early 2018, the South Korean president pursued a psychologically even smarter tactic: he began heaping compliments on President Trump for making it all happen.

True, Moon’s over-the-top praise flew in the face of what really lay behind the transformation in relations, but he, too, had been well briefed on the president’s personality and predilections. He, too, grasped that the American narcissist-in-chief would incline toward praise like a plant toward the sun. When asked if he should get a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, Moon immediately insisted that it was Trump, and Trump alone, who deserved such an honor. (Only later did Trump’s base begin chanting “Nobel! Nobel! Nobel!”)

The leaders of both Koreas grasped a reality that eluded Washington’s pundits: that Donald Trump was their best chance of disarming a skeptical American foreign policy elite. In gaining Trump’s support, the two Koreas have indeed, however paradoxically, neutralized the United States as an actor in the drama of inter-Korean relations.

Confronting the Impossible

Think of the story of the two Koreas as a parable of two “impossibles.”

The first impossible is denuclearization. Now that North Korea has a nuclear weapons program, it’s difficult to imagine that it will surrender such weaponry. After all, given the relative decline of its conventional forces, nukes provide a genuine insurance policy against any outside effort at regime change. They’re also the main reason the United States pays any attention to the country. Without nuclear weapons, North Korea would become as vulnerable as Iraq was in 2003 and as irrelevant as Laos after 1975. Nuclear weapons are Pyongyang’s ticket to international respect. Why on Earth would Kim Jong-un give them up in exchange for a non-aggression “guarantee” from the United States, a pledge that a subsequent administration might simply tear up (just as Trump recently shredded Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran)?

The second impossible is reunification. The Koreas are about as far apart as two countries coexisting in the same century could be, as economically disparate as Germany and Ghana, as politically different as Athens and Sparta. One country is thoroughly connected to the world community; the other maintains an isolation policy comparable to eighteenth-century Japan’s. Like matter and anti-matter, the two Koreas risk catastrophe if suddenly brought together.

There are three imaginable ways of dealing with these two impossibles. The first, of course, is the regime-change approach of National Security Advisor John Bolton and his fan club. The idea would be to accelerate the demise of Kim’s regime either indirectly through covert means or even directly through war. In the wake of a North Korean collapse, according to this crackpot scenario, the U.S. Army would sweep into that country, gathering up the loose nukes, while South Korea absorbed the north just as West Germany swallowed East Germany in 1990. No one with an ounce of sense, from academics to Pentagon officials, considers this a viable approach, given the heightened risk of a war with mass casualties, possibly tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, and the potential use of some of the North’s nukes in South Korea and beyond. And that’s not even taking into consideration the South’s unwillingness to contemplate the immense costs of an overnight reunification.

Despite Trump’s embrace of a summit with Kim Jong-un, Bolton hasn’t given up on this regime-change approach. He initially sought to load the summit agenda with enough non-nuclear issues (missiles, abductions of Japanese and South Koreans) to make it unwieldy and bound to fail. More critically, he insisted that the “Libya” model would serve as the example the United States would follow with North Korea — an ominous signal, given that the regime of Muammar Gaddafi collapsed under the pressure of a U.S.-NATO intervention several years after it gave up its nuclear program. In explaining why North Korea might cancel the summit with Trump, a government spokesman singled out Bolton and his Libya references. And in truth, the North Korean reaction was not a “tantrum,” as the Washington Post editorialized, but a reasonable objection to Bolton’s tactics.

The second approach, the default position for several decades, has been to wait for North Korea to “come to its senses” and beg for an agreement with the United States. Tighter sanctions and an inflexible negotiating position, the adherents of this theory believe, will eventually inflict so much pain on the North that, sooner or later, even the autocratic leadership of Pyongyang will realize its people can’t eat nukes and trade them in for a ticket to the global economy. However attractive this strategy may look, it obviously hasn’t worked over many years. Here, Trump’s critique of the Obama administration has for once been accurate.

The third approach, slow-motion reunification, finally seems to be emerging as the plan of choice for both Koreas. It treats each of the impossibles as resolvable over time.

Moon Jae-in adopted this approach to reunificationfrom his mentor, former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung. Cooperative economic projects are to be designed to gradually bridge the income gap between the two countries. Negotiations over a rail link and fishing rights in adjoining waters are meant to begin the process of harmonizing the political approaches of the two countries. According to a plan Moon delivered to Kim via USB drive at the April summit, South Korea would help its northern neighbor enter the global community by degrees so that, like a diver surfacing from a great depth, it wouldn’tsuffer the bends.

Denuclearization is equally tricky. But a slow-motion process might also square the circle. If North Korea and the United States agree to a staged reduction of the North’s nuclear weapons in exchange for a gradually increasing set of incentives, Kim Jong-un could potentially have his nukes (for a while) and give them up as well (eventually).

Although the elimination of nuclear weapons may be the ultimate goal — for North Korea as well as all other nuclear states — denuclearization as such could prove a distraction in the medium term. After all, Kim Jong-un could decide to reverse such a commitment or continue to pursue the objective secretly. So the goal should really be to ensure that North Korea doesn’t want to use those weapons — or any other weapons — because to do so would jeopardize its newfound position in the global economy. That was the U.S. strategy toward China in the 1970s after it, too, had become a nuclear power and it worked without either denuclearization or regime change.

In other words, the worst position Trump could take in Singapore would be to demand that North Korea completely and immediately abandon its nuclear weaponry before it receives any benefits from a reduction in global economic sanctions. By contrast, a more gradual timeline for denuclearization could well dovetail with slow-motion reunification. What many Korea watchers insist is a fatal flaw in the Trump-Kim summit — a completely different understanding of what denuclearization entails — might turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Such strategic ambiguity could allow both sides to make interim compromises and embrace an interim reduction in tensions even though they were incapable of really agreeing on the end game.

Which brings us back to all the skepticism surrounding the upcoming summit. Sure, it might end up more show than substance, but that would be fine. What the two Koreas really need is the equivalent of a papal benediction from Trump. Let the American president claim the credit, all of it, for processes of denuclearization and reunification meant to intersect at some distant horizon. Let him preen about his contributions to world peace (while he ratchets up war tensions against Iran). Let his fans chant and his Republican backers in Congress nominate him for a Nobel Prize. Let him cling to his misconceptions about North Korea, nukes, and the nature of geopolitics.

And then let him get out of the way so that the Koreans can do the real work, the historic work, the breakthrough work, of knitting the peninsula back together.

For a man with a reputation for venting spleen and flying off the handle, John Bolton bided his time before finally rising to the position of power he now occupies.

The former U.S. ambassador to the UN spent much of the last decade consolidating his political base through stints at right-wing institutes like the American Enterprise Institute, media appearances on Fox, and the occasional reckless op-ed. He considered running for president in 2012 and 2016 but chose not to take the risk. Instead, he raised large amounts of money for extreme right-wing Republican candidates like Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).

When Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, Bolton eagerly endorsed the candidate in the presidential race and offered himself up as a potential secretary of state. Trump won, but Bolton didn’t get the call. A similarity in temperament and a difference in ideology seemed to doom his appointment. The White House, after all, couldn’t possibly accommodate two filterless hotheads.

Moreover, Bolton’s continued support for the Iraq War and a more interventionist U.S. foreign policy seemed to put him forever at odds with the new president. “Bolton’s lambasting of global aristocrats aside, there isn’t much in the man’s worldview that rings consonant with President Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy,” wrote Daniel DePetris in The American Conservative.

That was then. Now John Bolton is Trump’s national security advisor.

After a steady diet of levelheaded corporate execs and restrained military men, Trump clearly wanted a little more hot sauce in the Oval Office. As for the differences in ideology, those were largely fictitious. Trump has no ideology, and Bolton is smart enough to tailor his message to his audience.

Trump is a very powerful boat with no rudder. Unfortunately, Bolton is now his rudder. Which effectively means, when it comes to foreign policy, that it’s Bolton’s administration now.

Bolton’s Impact

National security advisor is the perfect position for Bolton. He didn’t have to go through any messy confirmation hearings. He doesn’t have to perform any of the ceremonial tasks of a secretary of state.

He can instead focus on what he does best: steering government policy far to the right. Only a few weeks into his job, he can already put one notch in his gun for helping to steer the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal.

This should have been an easy task, since Trump had already made clear his distaste for the agreement. But there was still significant disagreement within the administration. Bolton, it appears, tilted the balance away from those, like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who preferred to remain within the agreement. Writes Mark Langler in The New York Times:

Even if Mr. Mattis had wanted to fight for the deal, it is not clear how much he would have been heard. Mr. Bolton, officials said, never convened a high-level meeting of the National Security Council to air the debate. He advised Mr. Trump in smaller sessions, otherwise keeping the door to his West Wing office closed. Mr. Bolton has forged a comfortable relationship with the president, several people said, channeling his “America First” vocabulary.

Now that he has this comfortable relationship, Bolton will move on to more challenging assignments. “By working in the West Wing, the national security adviser spends more time with the president than the secretaries of State or Defense, and so can always get the last word,” writes Jonathan Swan in Axios. “But Bolton is signaling restraint until Trump makes a decision.”

So, for instance, with the Iran deal decision made, Bolton has been coy about whether he’s still pushing a regime-change strategy toward Iran. In public, of course, he must defer to the president. In private, Bolton would never keep his ideas to himself. As one of the biggest boosters of the militant, cult-like People’s Mujahedin of Iran (or MEK), Bolton is no doubt whispering into Trump’s ear at every possible opportunity that Iran is on the verge of regime collapse and a cadre of Ahmed Chalabis are ready to take over. All it needs is a tightening economic noose and a military nudge from Israel.

Meanwhile, as the president’s enforcer, it’s Bolton’s job to play the bad cop. He’s already done so with Europe, raising the possibility of sanctioning European businesses that continue to work with Iran. Bolton must love the opportunity to kill two multilateral birds with one unilateral stone.

However, the test of Bolton’s impact shouldn’t be Iran, where his views intersect with Trump’s. The real challenge will be on issues where Bolton’s stated preferences are diametrically opposed to current policy.

From Regime Change to Rapprochement?

John Bolton has never concealed his desire to see the collapse of the current government in North Korea. In February, even after the two Koreas had cooperated in the Winter Olympics, Bolton continued to argue in the Wall Street Journal that the United States should launch a preemptive military attack on Pyongyang and its nuclear facilities.

The Journal piece featured a bizarre, legalistic argument based on his interpretation of a British attack on a Canadian steamboat in U.S. territory in 1837. (No, I’m not making this up). Bolton didn’t bother to devote any space to the likely consequences of a preemptive attack on North Korea that, unlike the British example, could escalate to an exchange of nuclear weapons and involve the deaths of more than a million people.

It was pure Bolton: a legal intellect plus an instinct for bombast — and minus any acknowledgement of real-world consequences.

Now, as national security advisor, Bolton must wrap his mind around the reality of the potential summit between his boss and Kim Jong Un, scheduled for June 12 in Singapore. This might seem to put Bolton in a bind, forcing him to make arguments that run counter to his long-held preferences.

But remember: Bolton knows how to bide his time. He knows that the track record of U.S.-North Korean negotiations isn’t very good. He knows that a failed summit could easily push Donald Trump to the other side of the spectrum — or perhaps, given North Korea’s reaction to the recent U.S.-South Korean military exercises, the summit might not happen at all. A Trump scorned will likely find regime-change arguments more compelling.

In the meantime, Bolton is doing what he can to subtly undermine the upcoming summit. He’s ratcheted down expectations by saying that the Trump administration isn’t “starry-eyed” about the meeting. He’s loaded the summit agenda by adding “their ballistic missile programs, their biological and chemical weapons programs, their keeping of American hostages, the abduction of innocent Japanese and South Korean citizens over the years.” It would be hard enough to negotiate a nuclear agreement even without adding these other elements (though North Korea has already released the “American hostages”).

But perhaps the most sinister tactic Bolton has deployed involves his references to Libya. In interviews, he has said that Libya’s denuclearization in the 2000s can serve as a model for the North Korea talks.

Libya? The country that gave up its nuclear weapons program and then, within a few years, experienced civil war, foreign intervention, and regime collapse? Is that really the kind of model you want to highlight with a country like North Korea, which is worried about precisely such a scenario?

An anonymous source in the Trump administration told Abigail Tracy of Vanity Fair that Bolton is sending his own message to the North Koreans: “I mean, there is only one reason you would ever bring up Libya to the North Koreans, and that is to tell them, ‘Warning: don’t go any further because we are going to screw you’… So yeah, I completely agree that that is a dog whistle to the North Koreans, telling them, ‘don’t trust us.’”

Of course, Bolton’s mere presence in the administration, even if he just stands quietly in the corner and scowls, sends the message that this government is not to be trusted. Perhaps that’s the real reason for North Korea’s sudden summit skepticism.

War at the Top?

John Bolton isn’t stupid enough to contradict his boss, at least not directly. He’s a sycophant to his superiors and a sunvabitch to his subordinates. The interesting part comes with his relations to his equals. The most interesting part will be his relationship with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Thomas Wright, in Politico, argues that Bolton and Pompeo are cruising for a mutual bruising. He argues that it’s not hawks versus doves in the Trump administration, but “litigators versus planners.”

The litigators, led by Trump and deputized to Bolton, see national security policy as a way of settling scores with enemies, foreign and domestic, and closing the file. They will torpedo multilateral deals, pull out of international commitments and demonstrate American power before moving on to the next target.

Planners, on the other hand, are worried about the day after — for instance, how the United States addresses Chinese economic power in the wake of a pullout from the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal.

It’s not yet clear whether Pompeo is a litigator or a planner, and thus whether he’ll team up with Bolton or side with the quintessential planner, Jim Mattis, to challenge the national security advisor’s blow-‘em-all-up philosophy. Wright expects a showdown.

I’m not sure. I expect tactical alliances between Bolton and Pompeo (on Iran) and tactical disagreements (on China). Where they disagree, Bolton probably will gain the upper hand, if not immediately then eventually, because he knows better how to manipulate the levers of power.

But on the general direction of Trump’s foreign policy, Bolton and Pompeo are in agreement. The faux-isolationism of Trump during his presidential campaign fooled a number of neoconservatives into voicing their opposition. But it didn’t fool either Bolton or Pompeo.

Let’s be clear: There is no American “retreat” from the world. Under the rubric of “America First,” the Trump administration has created a new kind of multilateral engagement — aligned with the hard right in Israel and Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, allied with authoritarian and far-right leaders like Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Viktor Orban in Hungary, and in support of a range of plutocratic interests over and above the wellbeing of the majority and the planet as a whole. (I long for Angela Merkel to just come out and say it: “Gott im Himmel, we must oppose this new Axis of Autocracy!)

So, not a retreat from the world but a retort to the world: Move this way, not that. As the Washington Examiner recently editorialized, “Trump’s foreign policy record is one of America continuing its role as global leader — even if we’re leading in a direction that displeases John Kerry.”

But please, let’s not talk about Trump’s “foreign policy record.” This is not the world of Donald Trump. The world of Trump is Mar-a-Lago, Fox News, and his Twitter account. His worldview is limited by his over-inflated ego and bank account.

No, this is the world of John Bolton. And, for a limited time before he blows it up, we’re just living in it.

John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands.

https://fpif.org/the-bolton-administration-has-already-begun/feed/033484The U.S. Military Takes Us Through the Gates of Hellhttps://fpif.org/the-u-s-military-takes-us-through-the-gates-of-hell/
https://fpif.org/the-u-s-military-takes-us-through-the-gates-of-hell/#respondTue, 15 May 2018 18:40:18 +0000Tom Engelhardthttps://fpif.org/?p=33478

Air Force Academy cadet (Pixabay)

As I was putting the finishing touches on my new book, the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute published an estimate of the taxpayer dollars that will have gone into America’s war on terror from September 12, 2001, through fiscal year 2018. That figure: a cool $5.6 trillion (including the future costs of caring for our war vets). On average, that’s at least $23,386 per taxpayer.

Keep in mind that such figures, however eye-popping, are only the dollar costs of our wars. They don’t, for instance, include the psychic costs to the Americans mangled in one way or another in those never-ending conflicts. They don’t include the costs to this country’s infrastructure, which has been crumbling while taxpayer dollars flow copiously and in a remarkably — in these years, almost uniquely — bipartisan fashion into what’s still laughably called “national security.” That’s not, of course, what would make most of us more secure, but what would make them — the denizens of the national security state — ever more secure in Washington and elsewhere. We’re talking about the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. nuclear complex, and the rest of that state-within-a-state, including its many intelligence agencies and the warrior corporations that have, by now, been fused into that vast and vastly profitable interlocking structure.

In reality, the costs of America’s wars, still spreading in the Trump era, are incalculable. Just look at photos of the cities of Ramadi or Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa or Aleppo in Syria,Sirte in Libya, or Marawiin the southern Philippines, all in ruins in the wake of the conflicts Washington set off in the post–9/11 years, and try to put a price on them. Those views of mile upon mile of rubble, often without a building still standing untouched, should take anyone’s breath away. Some of those cities may never be fully rebuilt.

And how could you even begin to put a dollars-and-cents value on the larger human costs of those wars: the hundreds of thousands of dead? The tens of millions of people displaced in their own countries or sent as refugees fleeing across any border in sight? How could you factor in the way those masses of uprooted peoples of the Greater Middle East and Africa are unsettlingother parts of the planet? Their presence (or more accurately a growing fear of it) has, for instance, helped fuel an expanding set of right-wing “populist” movements that threaten to tear Europe apart. And who could forget the role that those refugees — or at least fantasy versions of them — played in Donald Trump’s full-throated, successful pitch for the presidency? What, in the end, might be the cost of that?

Opening the Gates of Hell

America’s never-ending twenty-first-century conflicts were triggered by the decision of George W. Bush and his top officials to instantly define their response to attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center by a tiny group of jihadis as a “war”; then to proclaim it nothing short of a “Global War on Terror”; and finally to invade and occupy first Afghanistan and then Iraq, with dreams of dominating the Greater Middle East — and ultimately the planet — as no other imperial power had ever done.

Their overwrought geopolitical fantasies and their sense that the U.S. military was a force capable of accomplishing anything they willed it to do launched a process that would cost this world of ours in ways that no one will ever be able to calculate. Who, for instance, could begin to put a price on the futures of the children whose lives, in the aftermath of those decisions, would be twisted and shrunk in ways frightening even to imagine? Who could tote up what it means for so many millions of this planet’s young to be deprived of homes, parents, educations — of anything, in fact, approximating the sort of stability that might lead to a future worth imagining?

Though few may remember it, I’ve never forgotten the 2002 warning issued by Amr Moussa, then head of the Arab League. An invasion of Iraq would, he predicted that September, “open the gates of hell.” Two years later, in the wake of the actual invasion and the U.S. occupation of that country, he altered his comment slightly. “The gates of hell,” he said, “are open in Iraq.”

His assessment has proven unbearably prescient — and one not only applicable to Iraq. Fourteen years after that invasion, we should all now be in some kind of mourning for a world that won’t ever be. It wasn’t just the US military that, in the spring of 2003, passed through those gates to hell. In our own way, we all did. Otherwise, Donald Trump wouldn’t have become president.

I don’t claim to be an expert on hell. I have no idea exactly what circle of it we’re now in, but I do know one thing: we are there.

The Infrastructure of a Garrison State

If I could bring my parents back from the dead right now, I know that this country in its present state would boggle their minds. They wouldn’t recognize it. If I were to tell them, for instance, that just three men — Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett — now possess as much wealth as the bottom half of the US population, of 160 million Americans, they would never believe me.

How, for instance, could I begin to explain to them the ways in which, in these years, money flowed ever upward into the pockets of the immensely wealthy and then down again into what became one-percent elections that would finally ensconce a billionaire and his family in the White House? How would I explain to them that, while leading congressional Democrats and Republicans couldn’t say often enough that this country was uniquely greater than any that ever existed, none of them could find the funds — some $5.6 trillion for starters — necessary for our roads, dams, bridges, tunnels, and other crucial infrastructure? This on a planet where what the news likes to call “extreme weather” is increasingly wreaking havocon that same infrastructure.

My parents wouldn’t have thought such things possible. Not in America. And somehow I’d have to explain to them that they had returned to a nation which, though few Americans realize it, has increasingly been unmade by war — by the conflicts Washington’s war on terror triggered that have now morphed into the wars of so many and have, in the process, changed us.

Such conflicts on the global frontiers have a tendency to come home in ways that can be hard to track or pin down. After all, unlike those cities in the Greater Middle East, ours aren’t yet in ruins — though some of them may be heading in that direction, even if in slow motion. This country is, at least theoretically, still near the height of its imperial power, still the wealthiest nation on the planet. And yet it should be clear enough by now that we’ve crippled not just other nations but ourselves in ways that I suspect — though I’ve tried over these years to absorb and record them as best I could — we can still barely see or grasp.

In my new book, A Nation Unmade by War, the focus is on a country increasingly unsettled and transformed by spreading wars to which most of its citizens were, at best, only half paying attention. Certainly, Trump’s election was a sign of how an American sense of decline had already come home to roost in the era of the rise of the national security state (and little else).

Though it’s not something normally said here, to my mind President Trump should be considered part of the costs of those wars come home. Without the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and what followed, I doubt he would have been imaginable as anything but the host of a reality TV show or the owner of a series of failed casinos. Nor would the garrison-state version of Washington he now occupies be conceivable, nor the generals of our disastrous wars whom he’s surrounded himself with, nor the growth of a surveillance state that would have staggered George Orwell.

The Makings of a Blowback Machine

It took Donald Trump — give him credit where it’s due — to make us begin to grasp that we were living in a different and devolving world. And none of this would have been imaginable if, in the aftermath of 9/11, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney & Co. hadn’t felt the urge to launch the wars that led us through those gates of hell. Their soaring geopolitical dreams of global domination proved to be nightmares of the first order. They imagined a planet unlike any in the previous half millennium of imperial history, in which a single power would basically dominate everything until the end of time. They imagined, that is, the sort of world that, in Hollywood, had been associated only with the most malign of evil characters.

And here was the result of their conceptual overreach: never, it could be argued, has a great power still in its imperial prime proven quite so incapable of applying its military and political might in a way that would advance its aims. It’s a strange fact of this century that the U.S. military has been deployed across vast swaths of the planet and somehow, again and again, has found itself overmatched by underwhelming enemy forces and incapable of producing any results other than destruction and further fragmentation. And all of this occurred at the moment when the planet most needed a new kind of knitting together, at the moment when humanity’s future was at stake in ways previously unimaginable, thanks to its still-increasing use of fossil fuels.

In the end, the last empire may prove to be an empire of nothing at all — a grim possibility which has been a focus of TomDispatch, the website I’ve run since November 2002. Of course, when you write pieces every couple of weeks for years on end, it would be surprising if you didn’t repeat yourself. The real repetitiousness, however, wasn’t at TomDispatch. It was in Washington. The only thing our leaders and generals have seemed capable of doing, starting from the day after the 9/11 attacks, is more or less the same thing with the same dismal results, again and again.

The U.S. military and the national security state that those wars emboldened have become, in effect — and with a bow to the late Chalmers Johnson (a TomDispatch stalwart and a man who knew the gates of hell when he saw them) — a staggeringly well-funded blowback machine. In all these years, while three administrations pursued the spreading war on terror, America’s conflicts in distant lands were largely afterthoughts to its citizenry. Despite the largest demonstrations in history aimed at stopping a war before it began, once the invasion of Iraq occurred, the protests died out and, ever since, Americans have generally ignored their country’s wars, even as the blowback began. Someday, they will have no choice but to pay attention.

This essay is the introduction to Tom Engelhardt’s new book, A Nation Unmade by War, a Dispatch Book published by Haymarket Books.

https://fpif.org/the-u-s-military-takes-us-through-the-gates-of-hell/feed/033478Erdogan Wants to Be Turkey’s Lone Strongman. What If He Gets What He Wants?https://fpif.org/erdogan-wants-to-be-turkeys-lone-strongman-what-if-he-gets-what-he-wants/
https://fpif.org/erdogan-wants-to-be-turkeys-lone-strongman-what-if-he-gets-what-he-wants/#respondMon, 14 May 2018 21:22:36 +0000Conn Hallinanhttps://fpif.org/?p=33475

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When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for a presidential and parliamentary election June 24 — jumping the gun by more than a year — the outcome seemed foreordained.

After all, the country is under a state of emergency. Erdogan has imprisoned more than 50,000 of his opponents, dismissed 140,000 from their jobs, jailed a presidential candidate, and launched an attack on Syria’s Kurds that is, unfortunately, popular with most Turks.

But Erdogan’s seemingly overwhelming strength isn’t as solid as it appears, and the moves the president is making to ensure a victory next month may come back to haunt him in the long run.

An Economy Headed for a Fall

There’s a great deal at stake in the June vote. Based on the outcome of a referendum last year, Turkey will move from a parliamentary system to one based on a powerful executive presidency. But the referendum vote was very close, and there’s widespread suspicion that Erdogan’s narrow victory was fraudulent.

This time around, Turkey’s president is taking no chances. The electoral law has been taken out of the hands of the independent electoral commission and turned over to civil servants, whose employment is dependent on the government. The state of emergency will make campaigning by anyone but Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its ally, the National Action Party (MHP), problematic.

But Erdogan called for early elections not because he’s strong, but because he’s nervous about the AKP’s traditional strong suit: the economy. While growth is solid, unemployment is 11 percent (rising to 21 percent for youth), debts are piling up, and inflation — 12 percent in 2017 — is eating away at standards of living.

The AKP’s 16-year run in power is based in no small part on raising income for most Turks. But wages fell 2 percent over the past year, and the lira plunged 7.5 percent in the last quarter, driving up the price of imported goods. Standard & Poor’s recently downgraded Turkish bonds to junk status.

Up until now, the government has managed to keep people happy by handing out low interest loans, pumping up the economy with subsidies, and giving bonuses to pensioners. But the debt keeps rising, and investment — particularly the foreign variety — is lagging. The Turkish economy appears headed for a fall, and Erdogan wants to secure the presidency before that happens.

The Kurdish Question

To avoid a runoff, Erdogan needs to win 50 percent of the vote, and most polls show him falling short, partly due to voter exhaustion with the endless state of emergency. But this also reflects fallout from the president’s war on the Kurds, domestic and foreign.

The AKP came to power in 2002 with a plan to end the long-running war with Turkey’s Kurdish minority. The government dampened its suppression of Kurdish language and culture, and called a truce in the military campaign against the Kurdish Workers Party.

But in 2015, the leftist, Kurdish-based People’s Democratic Party (HDP) broke through the 10 percent threshold to put deputies in parliament, denying the AKP a majority. Erdogan promptly declared war on the Kurds. Kurdish deputies were imprisoned, Kurdish mayors were dismissed, Kurdish language signs were removed, and the Turkish army demolished the centers of several majority-Kurdish cities.

Erdogan also forced a new election — widely seen as fraudulent — and re-claimed the AKP’s majority.

Ankara also turned a blind eye to tens of thousands of Islamic State and Al-Qaeda fighters who crossed the Turkish border to attack the government of Bashar al-Assad and Syria’s Kurdish population. The move backfired badly. The Kurds — backed by American air power — defeated the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, and the Russians turned the tide in Assad’s favor.

Turkey’s subsequent invasion of Syria — operations Olive Branch and Euphrates Shield — is aimed at the Syrian Kurds and is supported by most Turks. But, no surprise, it’s alienated the Kurds, who make up between 18 and 20 percent of Turkey’s population.

The AKP has traditionally garnered a substantial number of Kurdish voters, in particular rural, conservative ones. But pollster Kadir Atalay says many Kurdish AKP supporters justifiably felt “deceived and abandoned” when Erdogan went after their communities following the 2015 election. Kurds have also been alienated by Erdogan’s alliance with the extreme right-wing nationalist MHP, which is violently anti-Kurdish.

According to Atalay, alienating the Kurds has cost the AKP about 4 percent of the voters. Considering that the AKP won 49.5 percent of the vote in the last national election, that figure is not insignificant.

The progressive HDP is trying hard to win over those Kurds. “The Kurds — even those who are not HDP supporters, will respond to the Afrin operation [i.e., the invasion of Syria], the removal of Kurdish language signs, and the imprisonment of [Kurdish] lawmakers,” HDP’s parliamentary whip Meral Danis Bestas told Al Monitor.

The HDP, whose imprisoned leader Selahatt Demirtas is running for president, calls for a “united stance” that poses “left-wing democracy” against “fascism.” The danger is that if the HDP fails to get at least 10 percent of the vote, its current seats will taken over by the AKP.

An Outside Chance of Failure

Erdogan has also alienated Turkey’s neighbors. He’s in a tense standoff with Greece over some tiny islands in the Aegean Sea. He’s at loggerheads with a number of European countries that have banned him from electioneering among their Turkish populations for the June 24 vote. And he’s railing against NATO for insulting Turkey. (He does have a point — a recent NATO exercise designated NATO member Turkey “the enemy.”)

However, Erdogan’s attacks on NATO and Europe are mostly posturing. He knows Turkish nationalists love to bash the European Union and NATO, and Erdogan needs those votes to go to him, not the newly formed Good Party — a split from the rightwing MHP — or the Islamist Felicity Party.

No one expects the opposition to pull off an upset, although the centrist and secular Republican People’s Party (CHP) has recently formed an alliance with the Good Party, Felicity, and the Democratic Party to ensure that all pass the 10 percent threshold for putting deputies in parliament.

That electoral alliance excludes the leftist HDP, although it is doubtful the Kurdish-based party would find common ground with parties that supported the jailing of its lawmakers. Of the party’s 59 deputies, nine are in jail and 11 have been stripped of their seats.

There’s an outside chance that Erdogan could win the presidency but lose his majority in parliament. If the opposition does win, it has pledged to dump the new presidential system and return power to parliament.

Loaded Dice

The election will be held essentially under martial law, and Erdogan has loaded all the dice, marked every card, and rigged every roulette wheel.

There’s virtually no independent media left in the country, and there are rumors that the AKP and the MHP have recruited and armed “supporters” to intimidate the opposition. A disturbing number of guns have gone missing since the failed 2016 coup.

However, as Max Hoffman of the Center for American Progress notes, the election might not be a “slam dunk.” A run-off would weaken Erdogan just when he is preparing to take on a number of major problems other than the economy:

Turkey’s war with the Kurds has now spread into Syria and Iraq.

In Syria, Assad is likely to survive and Turkey will find it difficult — and expensive — to permanently occupy eastern Syria. Erdogan will also to have to deal with the thousands of Islamic State and al-Qaeda fighters now in southern Turkey.

Tensions are growing with Egypt over the Red Sea and Ankara’s new alliance with Sudan, which is at odds with Cairo over Nile River water rights.

There’s the strong possibility of a U.S confrontation with Iran, a nominal ally and important trading partner for Turkey.

There’s also the possibility — albeit a remote one — that Turkey will get into a dustup with Greece.

And last, there’s the rising price of oil — now over $70 a barrel — and the stress that will put on the already indebted Turkish economy.

The Turkish president may get his win next month, but when trouble comes, he won’t be able to foist it off on anyone. He will own it.

The significance of Pakistan’s elections later this year lies in the fact that this will only be the second time a democratic transition of power will occur in the country. The first peaceful transition was in 2013, when Asif Ali Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) handed the reins of government over to Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N). Prior to 2008, no democratic government had completed its five years in office.

The fragility of democracy in Pakistan owes much to its history – a diverse population, an overly centralized authority, fear of neighboring India, and excessive reliance on the military. The transition that took place in 2013 was doubly remarkable considering the economic crises gripping the country. Since 2013, Pakistan has been in the throes of a severe fiscal and current account deficit, with reserves barely enough to cover two months of imports. The incumbent government’s struggles are only further compounded by a vigorous form of judicial activism and by the landmark Supreme Court verdict in the Panama Papers case in July 2017 that disqualified then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

The court ruled in the case that Sharif had been dishonest for not revealing the United Arab Emirates work permit he held. This dissimulation, the court argued, violated Articles 62 and 63 of Pakistan’s constitution—which stipulate that a person has to be “truthful” and “trustworthy” to be a part of Pakistan’s parliament. Ironically, the infamous military dictator Zia-ul-Haq inserted these clauses into the constitution, and Nawaz Sharif had never actually withdrawn any salary based on that work permit.

The verdict in the Panama Papers case is just one element of the judicial activism currently gripping Pakistan. Since 2007, Pakistan’s judiciary has been increasingly active in influencing decisions of public policy even to the point of encroaching on what should be the parliament’s area of work.

This clash of institutions is in fact endemic to Pakistan’s democracy and highlights the potential pitfalls that could mar the elections. The greatest threat to democratic rule in Pakistan has historically emerged from state institutions such as the military that have always made their presence felt on Pakistan’s political landscape.

Military Influence

This influence has taken both direct and indirect forms, with direct influence in the form of military coups that overthrew democratic rule in 1958, 1977, and 1999. Today, however, public opinion seems to have turned against direct military rule and now acts as a significant bulwark against a possible military takeover.

The military’s indirect influence on the electoral process, however, remains a potential threat. This indirect influence stems from the present paradigm of Pakistan’s politics where several local and national level parties vie for seats in the National Assembly. This panoply of contesting parties usually results in no single party gaining enough votes to form the government. Local parties and independent legislators, therefore, carry significant influence primarily because larger parties use them to form government. It is these candidates and local parties that the military has historically manipulated to influence electoral outcomes in the country.

Pakistan’s history, in fact, is replete with examples of the military doing just that. The most blatant of these incidents was the Mehran Bank Scandal that rocked Pakistan in the early 1990s. The scandal involved the army chief of staff and the head of the intelligence agency secretly channelling funds to politicians through the now defunct Mehran Bank. These funds were then used to create the conservative coalition Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI), which stood in opposition to Benazir Bhutto and prevented her re-election in the 1990 elections. The IJI won those elections by a large margin and was thus able to form the government.

Political maneuvring on the eve of any election in Pakistan, therefore, suggests the army’s involvement. It thus does not bode well for the upcoming elections that similar political scheming has emerged as political loyalties begin to shift. Most of this maneuvring has been aimed at weakening the PML-N’s hold on power.

A few months ago, for instance, several PML-N legislators in the province of Balochistan inexplicably left the party. The PML-N which initially governed the province was forced to relinquish the post of chief minister to a party with far fewer seats in the provincial assembly. Similarly, PML-N parliamentarians hailing from South Punjab also broke away from the PML-N and have formed an independent splinter group. These machinations mere months before election season are an attempt to marginalize the PML-N and wreak havoc in its ranks. It is only a matter of time before the uncertainty surrounding the PML-N in Balochistan and southern Punjab spreads throughout the party as legislators ponder their chances of winning the elections on a PML-N ticket.

Establishing the army’s culpability in these developments, however, is difficult because of the surreptitious nature of these events. Yet the army stands to gain the most from a weakened PML-N. After coming to power in 2013, the current government has locked horns with the army over key issues such as relations with India, overseeing the military operation against the Taliban in northwest Pakistan, and the annual defense budget. Thus, if the army is successful in side-lining the PML-N and in bringing to power a party that relies on the military’s patronage, it will better be able to influence domestic and foreign policy.

Other Undemocratic Influences

Pakistan’s democracy, thus, continues to be haunted by the ominous presence of undemocratic forces and outside influence. The electoral process, moreover, is also plagued by problems that challenge the veracity of electoral outcomes. Pakistan only recently adopted electoral reforms, and parliament was unable to place a cap on campaign spending. The Election Commission of Pakistan—the body responsible for overseeing the elections—also suffers from a dearth of trained staff that can be influenced by political actors.

Another significant challenge in the upcoming elections is the narrow political spectrum and the complete lack of left-wing progressive parties taking part in the election. The two main contenders—the PML-N and Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) are conservative parties that adhere to a neoliberal model of development. There is currently no party promoting reforms that could help Pakistan ameliorate the staggering levels of poverty in the country. This narrowing of the political spectrum has in fact become characteristic of Pakistan’s political culture since Zia-ul-Haq’s authoritarian rule in the 1980s and his firm belief in an ideology that blended religious conservatism with neoliberal planning.

Despite the presence of challenges like the role of the military, a lack of electoral reforms, low levels of literacy, and the marginalization of left-wing movements, Pakistan’s obstinate adherence to democracy is a testament to the country’s resilience and belief in the power of elections. A smooth transition of power, thus, will be a major step in cementing democracy in Pakistan.